Punchclock
by Malteaser
Summary: Hatter is a working man.
1. Cow Tipping

When I got my first job, my life was going something like this: I was lacking in parents, a home, and money. I didn't really consider food or shelter a problem (it was just early enough in the famine years that scrounging for food wasn't too difficult or dangerous, and Wonderland was warm as a general rule, and full of niches that a skinny teenager could fold himself into for the night and be relatively safe) but that did nothing for the holes in the bottoms of my shoes and the fact that my shirts and pants were getting a little short around the cuffs.

So, I became a milk boy. Yeah, I know…

There used to be a fair number of dairy farms not too far outside the city limits, you see. As the city got larger, and the road system collapsed, and many of the owners were forcibly relocated, what that amounted to was a bunch of rundown buildings and overgrown fields full of feral cows, completely separated from the people who wanted things like cheese and milk and butter.

Don't laugh. I am dead serious, those things are scary. Have you ever seen how big a cow is? Now imagine that it's angry, and trying it's best to pound you into the ground while bellowing for its even larger and scarier boyfriend to turn you into bone meal.

Ideally, you had to sneak out of the city with your bucket at night, and then, while it was dark, try and find a cow that a) was actually a cow, and not a steer and b) actually had some milk in it. Then, once you had something approaching a full bucket, you snuck back into the city, and handed over your supply in exchange for a bit of quid. _Ideally_. More often than not, it involved running for the nearest tree, sod the pail. Those cows are not half as unaware and stupid as they look, and they were vicious, vicious creatures.

Anyway, that job didn't last long. On top of the fact that it was exhausting work with very little gain and more than a bit of danger, there was a riot just a few months after I started. Sneaking outside in general was dangerous, and sneaking out of the city itself was pretty much suicide. By the time the Suits had come in and restored order- by which I mean, shot enough people that everyone else stepped back into place- I'd already decided that it wasn't worth it to keep working there. I wasn't sure what, exactly, I would do, but I knew for a fact that it would not involve cows of any sort.

Which is how I ended up working for a man called Bull. That you can laugh at.

**A/N: You guys. I don't even know how to deal with the number of hits and reviews and favorites and suchlike I am getting. Thank you all so much, I can't tell you how encouraged I am by the fact that people enjoy reading my work. Thank you.**


	2. The Artful Dodge

His name was Beauregard, actually, but most of his friends called him Bull, because that was what he did. He was a conman, a stage performer fallen upon hard times and who swindled and tricked his way into people's wallets not just for the money, but for the chance to show off in front of a crowd again. He loved it. It was something we had in common, we quickly discovered. It's probably why we stuck for as long as we did.

It was just supposed to be for one job, originally: he needed someone to serve as a fake mark, and I looked enough like a respectable youth to pass for a schoolboy, add an air of credibility to his routine by winning my wages with a turn or two. The fact that I actually knew how to read and write helped, when a passing Suit decided to see if he couldn't up his arrest count with me and him. It was a bit close: I had no idea what 'tmesis' was and apparently I should have, but in the end we got away with it and the rest was history.

I loved it. Out of all the jobs I've had I think that one was the most fun. I know, it's shocking, isn't it? But there was something so exhilarating about going up against someone who had the advantage by most measures, and managing to win anyway. You know what I'm talking about. It's sort of the same way you get all bouncy after demonstrating for the beginner's class at the start of a semester how you are very capable of wiping the floor with any six of the men.

Yeah, I thought so.

Anyway, Bull was a great showman, with quick hands and an even quicker mind but he wasn't much one for practicalities. He was always going to the same three places, which really weren't exactly great locations for attracting a crowd of passersby in the first place and made him a predictable target for overly-zealous Suits to boot. He said that is people couldn't figure out that he was the best in the business without either coming to him or leaving him alone as applicable then it was their own fault. You can see how much trouble that sort of attitude could get a guy into. So, after a while I began to handle keeping us in the black and out of prison, and he taught me how to run some cons of my own. The hat tricks I knew already- it sort of runs in the family, my parents were around long enough to pass it along- but he taught me sleight of hand things with shells and cards and dice and the like. Between the two of us, we managed to make enough to sublet a little room in addition to keeping us in food and clothing. Things were pretty good for a while. Naturally, that only lasted a year and a half.

There was another crackdown. They were just looking for hunger mongers at first-

Hunger mongers? Well. That famine that I keep mentioning never actually happened, legally speaking. Legally speaking, the Queen provided for all of a citizen's dietary needs, and the only people who needed black market products to survive were those who were no longer considered citizens. Wanted criminals, resistance fighters, you get the picture. It was completely untrue, by the way. You got three meals out of your government rations, yes, but you'd have to string them out over the course of a week, which did absolutely nothing to alleviate the fact that you were starving. So, people began to buy from alternative sources. It all had to be produced in the city, because, well, you've seen Wonderland roads. There was the dairy I used to work for, and all her competitors, and then there were people who would pay to have dirt bought in, and then farm in condemned buildings with whatever seeds you could get your hands on. Chickens were pretty popular for your average family to keep, because if you just had one or two or even three you could pass them off as pets, and still produce enough to keep everyone fed. Later on I knew people who had goats as well, using the same excuse.

And all of that stuff that kept everyone from dying of starvation was called hunger mongering in legalese, because it encouraged the idea that there was a famine and the Queen couldn't provide for all her citizen's needs. Those sorts of round ups would happen every few weeks, normally very little would come of it, but this one was different. The logic that people who were wanted by the government wouldn't be buying from them was essentially true, after all, and they managed to get their hands on one of the Resistance's leading men at the time, Humpty Dumpty. It didn't take long for him to fall all to pieces and start naming names, and then things got really ugly.

It was the biggest mass round-up and execution in Wonderland's history, or they said at the time. A lot of people were also saying that they'd managed to kill as many Resistance members as they had knights, although I'm pretty sure that was actually just some bigwig's idea of propaganda. I wasn't in the apartment when the Suits came, I'd made a run for a farm I'd been fairly certain was still in operation and was talking my way into a dozen ears of corn. When I came back the place had been emptied and had a notice stuck to the front door.

The thing is, I know Bull had nothing to do with the Resistance. Our landlady did, that was a secret she never kept as well as she could have, but he was too busy being out with me working a crowd to get involved with much of anything political. He fit the profile, though, and that's what did him in. He worked for himself, because he enjoyed it rather than because he needed to eat or wanted the money. It's a dangerous sort of person who can do that, you know. They tend to be difficult to manipulate.

I waited until the hullabaloo died down, then sold most of his stuff before the looters could get a hold of it. I hoofed it to another part of the city and began doing his routines. I never made as much as he had, but then again, it was a different sort of neighborhood I was working, and I never quite got the hang of making potential customers feel like they were special, so much as I could make them feel like they were _getting_ something special. That didn't work as well with con games as I'd hoped. Even without the right sort of shine I was able to make enough to get by. Mostly.

I wasn't making nearly enough to turn down an opportunity to get into the tea business, though. Not even close.


	3. Kept Thyme

Her name was Thyme, and when we met she was the owner of the Tea Shop you found me in. And she ran it quite well, too. Every last bit of wealth she could squeeze out of her customers, the Crown, even her employees she found a way to get her hands on. Anyway, I had set myself up not too far from the Tea Shop, and she came out to watch me. It made me a bit nervous at first, because when I say 'watch', I actually mean 'stare at without blinking for nearly an hour'. As it turned out, she noticed that I was a faster talker, and offered me a job as an understudy tea cozy.

Tea cozies were the people who were out on the floor, getting up close and personal with the customers, hence the turn of phrase. It was our job to convince them that they could afford just a little, at a higher rate. That they were getting something special. As far as I knew at the time, it was the truth. Every other bit of Wonderland I'd seen had crumbled to dust long ago, and I couldn't imagine that they'd been anything special to look at beforehand. I really thought Tea was the only thing that put the wonder in Wonderland. It didn't change anything really, but for a while there it didn't matter what sort of crappy sob story was passing as your life. You could be Happy or Hopeful or even Euphoric or Blissful. How could it be anything but wonderful?

Yeah, well, anyway, Tea cozying could be a taxing, hectic business, and just because someone was out sick with the plague or smallpox or something didn't mean a Tea Shop had to operate understaffed. Whenever anyone was out, whether it was for the day or even a few hours, Thyme would send for me and I would fill in for them. While no more secure than my normal job as a hustler, it paid several times as well. I could afford an apartment again, clothes that actually fit, a warm meal once and a while…

Yeah. Tea.

I took Self-Assurance. I figured, if nothing else, it would help with the job. Which I needed to get more Self-Assurance, which I needed for the job, which I needed for more-

What do you mean you've seen this anti-drug commercial? I'm being deadly, dastardly serious.

Well dastardly might not mean what I think it means on this side of the Looking Glass…

Speaking of dastardly- you're definition of it, anyway- it wasn't long before I found out that Thyme wasn't paying me what I would have earned for the same amount of work as a full-time cozy. It's not an unusual practice, understudies can be as unreliable at showing up to work as work can be for showing up for them- but what made this different was that she had no proper Tea cozies. According to her books, she had a full-time staff of eight, but every single person who actually worked there was an understudy like me, getting underpaid for their services, with Thyme pocketing the difference in wages. She could be reasonably certain that no one would notice it: they would either be too steeped in Tea, or too busy trading it to keep track of who was working at which time. I was hoping to find some way of angling into a full time position, so I suppose I paid better attention than most.

It was a pretty smooth operation. I spent a fair amount of time appreciating it, before I tried to figure out how to use that bit of information to my advantage. I couldn't just go and demand a better job in exchange for my silence, because it's not like my word would have meant anything to a Suit, and she knew it, and then I'd be out of even the understudy position. Thankfully, before I had to think about it too hard- because, well, Tea addles your brain, messes with your body's natural chemistry, supports a corrupt regime, you get the picture- an opportunity to advance presented itself to me.

His name was Harold March.

**A/N: Thanks to Sony Boy for spotting my error in the last chapter. Sorry, my bad!**


End file.
